


Angels

by Scilera



Category: The Avengers (2012), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dark, F/M, tasertricks - Freeform, this is not a happy fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-23
Updated: 2013-06-23
Packaged: 2017-12-15 22:58:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/854976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scilera/pseuds/Scilera
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Standing on the roof to the last part of her former home to remain standing, she looked out on all the destruction she and her allies had wrought.  This was so much worse than seeing London.  This place she had intimately known when it had been full of light and life and color.  She could see those ghosts overlaying the blood and wreckage and bodies that were as much her kills as if she'd pulled the trigger, if she'd pushed the buttons.</p>
<p>There was fire in the distance and she knew, somewhere deep down inside her soul – in the last place the ice had not touched – that it was almost over.  That soon her work would be finished.  The debt she owed by being part of this would be repaid in blood by her part in ending it.  She no longer had enough faith in the universe to believe she could ever be at peace after this, but she did want to rest.  Soon, she told her tired body, soon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Angels

**Author's Note:**

> This is not a happy fic. It is the child of my mind after some distressing news and some deeper contemplation. 
> 
> It is raw and un-beta'd. Please be gentle.

 

 

It began – as all these things do – beautifully.

_Her building, her home, her very life was crumbling and crashing down all around her. She wasn't brave, she wasn't special, she wasn't even pretty enough to be saved by one of the superheroes flitting in and out of her peripheral._

_Part of her wanted to scream, wanted to cry and howl and rage against the unfairness of a universe that had thrust her into so many heroic and chaotic situations without giving her the power to do anything but observe._

_Perhaps that was her purpose, merely to be the one simple-minded human who bore witness to the insanity her world was subject to. A silent, unnamed witness. She watched a piece of marble break from its anchor and crush the old woman in front of her from the waist down. She saw a child – her grandson, most likely – crying as he tugged on the lifeless arm, trying to wake his grandmother and make everything right by sheer force of will alone._

_She watched a blur of red-white-and-blue swoop in and snatch the screaming child just before a metal girder crashed to the exact space he had occupied. If sheer force of will could do anything, she would have fixed so much by now. But it didn't. So she stood here and she did the only thing she knew how. She witnessed the loss of lives that wouldn't be remembered._

_She watched the support above her shudder loose from its own anchor and thought that it was fitting, in a poetic justice kind of way, that the last thing she would observe would be her own death. But even she, who had so much experience in witnessing death and destruction, was not strong enough to behold her own. Inhaling deeply, she let her eyes slide closed and felt a strange kind of peace._

_She didn't know what she expected her death to feel like. Certainly, however, she hadn't expected it to feel like cool, strong arms and a syncopated heartbeat._

Oh how wrong she had been.

_She woke up to cool silk sheets and warm darkness._

_A pair of eyes stared at her, illuminated by a shaft of muted light. They were beautiful eyes, a mixture of silver and green that she'd never seen before. The skin around their corners was tight and wary, but there was a painful yearning in them that struck a chord in her._

“ _Why didn't you run?” His voice was absolutely enchanting, cultured and smooth and soft in all the right ways. She sat up and stared right back at him. She could lie to him, make up some excuse about being too scared to do anything. It was the excuse she would have given the others, had her circumstances been different._

“ _Running is pointless,” she said instead. “And I don't have the strength to fight.”_

_Those eyes, those beautiful, dangerous eyes, narrowed in suspicion._

“ _I've run from other deaths,” she explained. “It didn't make me any safer. If I'd run from that one, there would only be more.”_

_Something in what she said seemed to resonate with him. There was a flash of some emotion on his face and then he was still. The silence stretched between them for so long that she forgot what her own voice sounded like._

“ _Why did you save me?” That was the wrong thing to ask. Like lightning, the semi-tranquility about his form was replaced by an angry tension that would have frightened her if she'd been anyone else and this had been any other day. “I know who you are,” she continued, feeling like she was detached from her body. “I tasered your brother.” For some reason, she expected that to lighten the mood between them, to lift the weight from his posture and expression._

_It didn't. He shook his head and smiled at her, but it was an empty smile and they both knew it._

“ _Then you also know it was inevitable.”_

_It was true, she supposed. Their family had a thing for mortals. It was the most twisted family hobby she'd ever heard of, but she supposed it would make sense to take interest in one that already knew about him having skeletons in his closet. She nodded, but that only seemed to make him more agitated. He got up from his perch across the room and began to pace. She tracked his progress with her eyes, once again bearing witness to the struggles of those with significance. When he finally rounded on her, she was almost ready for it._

“ _Why aren't you afraid of me?” he demanded harshly, looming over her with his face intimidatingly close to her own._

“ _Because,” she answered on a breath. “I'm insignificant.” That didn't seem to be the answer he was expecting. The open turmoil on his face and in his eyes touched her. She reached up one hand to lay the palm softly against his cheek, offering him a small smile. “It's kind of peaceful, you know, being insignificant.”_

_He inhaled sharply and for a moment she was sure she was staring at her own death for the second time that day, but he did not kill her. He grabbed her by the shoulders and kissed her so hard that she forgot to breathe. The intensity was as intoxicating as sunshine and she found herself falling into him without a moment's hesitation._

It was death that she embraced that night, though she did not know it until much later.

_She stood at the window in nothing but her own skin. He liked her best that way and she had become enamored of pleasing him. The sky outside was growing lighter and the glass was cold against her shoulder and the side of her face. Her breath frosted the space next to her mouth and she tried very hard to remember if she had woken from a dream or if she was still in one._

_Cool, familiar fingertips brushed down the sides of her neck, the motion strengthening into equally-cool hands stroking over her clavicles and down her upper arms. A strong chest bound in leather and metal pressed against her bare back. A soft mouth was at her ear, teeth nipping at the tissue there._

“ _Are you afraid of me?” It was his greeting and his farewell._

“ _Never,” she breathed. It was how she said 'I love you'._

_Those hands, beautiful and deadly, ghosted over her stomach and crossed so that she was enveloped in an embrace that was both possessive and tender. He turned her around with such care, lifting her chin to make her look him in the eye and smiling down at her with such warmth that she forgot all about the chill of the room and his hands. He leaned down and kissed her slowly, thoroughly. With every precise stroke of lips and tongue, he bound her more suredly than ropes or chains ever could._

_She took him to his bed and they moved together until her body had brought heat to his icy skin and his exertion had brought sweat to his brow. In the aftermath, they lay tangled in sheets and each other until the rhythm of her breathing settled into the deeper pulse of sleep. He detached himself with care not to wake her and leaned down to kiss her temple._

“ _You are mine,” he whispered against her skin. “My fearless treasure.” It was how he said 'I love you' back._

_He missed the smile that twisted her lips as he slipped back out into the world beyond their room._

In the end, she knew, she was responsible for all of her own misery. She wasn't strong, but she _was_ fair.

_Lips at her temple woke her from her dozing and she smiled. She knew those lips. Reaching up blindly, her hands found the sides of his face and she caressed the line of his cheekbone with her thumb. She blinked the sleep from her eyes and looked up into an expression of such intense adoration that she felt something leap and catch fire in her chest._

“ _Come, my treasure. There is something I must show you.” He offered his hand and she allowed him to help her to her feet. She wore nothing and she couldn't help but be pleased with the hunger that lit in his eyes as he appreciated that fact. His hands caressed her arms and chest, one of them weighing her breast in its palm as his thumb swiped across its nipple, hard from the cold. She gasped and he smirked, releasing his grip and weaving his unique brand of magic around her body and then turning her to face the room's full-length mirror._

_She could not believe the image staring back at her. She wore a gown of rich hunter velvet, cut tightly and wide at the top to show off her chest in a way that was almost – **almost** – indecent. The inner sleeves were made of golden silk and hugged her arms tightly while the outer sleeves belled almost to the floor. A belt of gold sat on her hips and there were emeralds and diamonds in the heavy choker around her neck and in the elaborate diadem woven into her pinned-up curls. She looked like something out of Lothlorien and it didn't escape her notice that the hues were all done to match exactly his ceremonial armor and golden helm-crown._

_Standing there together, they looked like two pieces in a set. When he turned to face her and bowed over her hand, brushing a kiss against the knuckles, she beamed at him so brightly her face hurt. For just the barest fraction of an instant, he looked... surprised, but covered it with his usual smirking grace and tucked her arm into his._

_She was led out of their room and down a gloriously beautiful hall until they stood before a set of black curtains. He paused and turned to look down at her with a laugh hidden behind his eyes._

“ _Are you afraid of me?” he asked._

“ _Never,” she answered firmly._

_The curtains swept themselves aside and he led her out onto a balcony overlooking a square filled with people who cheered deliriously as they emerged._

“ _My people!” he cried with a smile, his voice magnified to echo throughout the square. “It is my great honor to present you with the crown jewel of my world.” He turned to look at her and there was something so manic in his eyes that her breath caught in her throat_

“ _My people, allow me to present... your queen!”_

_The roar that followed that statement drowned out the little gnawing worm of worry in her gut._

It had been the most beautiful dream she had ever imagined – and she was living it...

_Her life from that moment was one of endless summer._

_He trusted her to see to the happiness of their people. She performed her duty flawlessly with concerts, garden parties, art exhibits and balls the likes of which had once only existed in fairytales. She woke up to his mouth, spent her day in silks and velvets and diamonds and pearls, then went to bed to his body and his arms._

_And if he clung to her too tightly on the nights she would eventually wake up to his nightmares, she didn't mind in the least._

_Time passed without her knowledge or her consent. When moving from one beautiful thing to the next, to the next, such concepts as time begin to lose their meaning. When she missed her courses, the doctors were summoned with all haste. When they announced that she was carrying his heir, she thought her whole being would burst with all the joy crammed into her life._

_She canceled her entire evening and broke the news over a lovers' private meal._

_He froze. Everything in him just... stopped. Fearing the worst, she slowly forced herself to meet his eyes and was floored by the almost childlike wonder she saw there. He stood and lifted her to him, cradling her gently against his body and staring at her like she was something he had never seen before and would never fully understand._

“ _You are mine,” he promised against her mouth. She could have sworn she felt wetness on his cheeks as he kissed her. “My impossible treasure.”_

_He took her to bed that night and loved her like she was the most precious and fragile of things._

_He didn't let her out of his sight for three weeks. The nightmares that had plagued him for as long as she had known him did not once rear their ugly head._

_When he was called away to urgent business in the north, she thought nothing of it. She sent him off with a kiss. When he turned back at the door and ran back to stand in front of her, gripping her hands tightly, she was surprised and confused._

“ _Are you afraid of me?” he demanded in a low, frightened way. She stood on tiptoe and kissed him slowly, thoroughly._

“ _Never,” she breathed against his lips. He inhaled deeply, drew himself up to his full, impressive height, and was gone._

But such dreams never lasted. It was the nature of the ephemeral. She could not have fought that any more than she could have fought gravity or the coming of the dawn...

That didn't make it hurt any less.

_When he had been gone a week, she sent a string of silent curses at whatever stupid politicians were taking his time so completely._

_When he had been gone three, she sent her own couriers into the north asking after progress and when he thought he'd be home. She never heard from those people again._

_When six weeks had gone by with nothing, she decided that enough was enough. Ordering her jet be made ready, she set her jaw and barreled through every single servant, dignitary, politician and soldier that tried to stop her. In the end, she had the trump card. She was their Queen. They could not defy her without risking her lover's wrath._

_The flight was uneventful, even peaceful. She looked out the window at the serene world of sunlight and clouds at their cruising altitude and laid a hand over her stomach. A feeling of warmth, of love so absolute it hurt, of terrifying protectiveness, it all seized her with such violence that she was dizzy for a good half hour while the plane slowly angled into descent._

_When they left the protecting shield of cloud-cover, the scene stretched out on the ground below made her heart thunder madly in her chest._

_This was not the world of light and sweetness and beauty that she had come to associate with her life and her love. As far as she could see, all was darkness and death and decay. The entire city of London was simply gone, replaced by rubble and filth and blood and fire. Landmarks she had learned to recognize from childhood were smashed almost beyond recognition. Even now, the lights of war flickered in the streets._

_She couldn't look anymore. Wrenching herself from her seat, she stumbled to the cockpit and leaned against the side of the door._

“ _Captain, do we have enough fuel to make it home without landing?” Both men twisted around in their seats to stare at her. Her face must have betrayed the dizziness and nausea she couldn't fight down, because they looked alarmed._

“ _Aye, Majesty. We always carry reserves, just in... case.” The way he said the last part made something nasty and suspicious rear its head inside her mind._

“ _In case of what, Captain?” The silence that greeted that question was going to make her lose her sanity. “In case of what!” she screamed. Both men jumped._

“ _In... case of enemy attack, Your Majesty.” It was the co-pilot who spoke and he looked very sad when he did so, resignation carving ugly lines in his youthful face._

“ _I see,” she answered quietly. There really was nothing else she could say. “I am feeling extremely unwell. Please turn around and inform Dr Chambers to meet me at the residence.”_

“ _Of course, Majesty,” the captain answered sharply. He was obviously a man of duty and honor who did not like being put into situations that were less than black and white. “Right away.” She pitied him._

Even then, she was still half-blind. All she wanted, what she desperately _needed_ was a good explanation. The right words spoken by the right man to make her world stop spinning and her life make sense once again.

“ _Your body has been undergoing more changes than I'm used to seeing this early in a pregnancy, Majesty. Everything appears stable, but you **must** rest. This is extensive hormonal remodeling and will take its toll on you if you don't keep up your strength.”_

“ _But my baby,” she demanded harshly, desperately. “My child... is -” She couldn't seem to get her mouth around the poisonous fears that snaked up her throat._

“ _Is **fine** , ma'am, and developing beautifully. I'll be back in the morning to check on you both.” She nodded and mumbled her thanks, leaning against the window and relishing the feel of the cold glass on the side of her face and her shoulder. The doors flew open and she didn't even have to look._

_She didn't have to, but she still did. Even here, even now, he was like the magnet to her scrap metal._

_He stood in the doorway, filthy and charred and breathing heavily. Their eyes met and he closed the distance between them in three strides, taking her into his arms and holding her to him in a tight embrace. It didn't matter that she didn't return it, that all she could think of was that he smelled like smoke and rage and blood and **where** had she smelled that before? Finally, something of her numb and unresponsive nature must have sunk in, because he pulled back enough to take her face in his hands, holding her like she was something precious and searching her face with an intensity that used to make her burn for him._

_Now it only made her feel more cold._

“ _You promised me light and beauty and music,” she choked out, the tears she'd held back for hours finally breaking their chains and spilling down the sides of her face. He recoiled as if she'd struck him across the face. For the first time in... oh, so long, she saw his eyes grow hard and his entire face close down into a careful blank._

“ _No, my treasure, I promised you the world.” He took half a step back from her and then another, spreading his arms at his sides as if displaying for her the way she once had posed for his pleasure. “The world you knew was nothing more than chaos and death masquerading as freedom and progress. This is the price we pay to teach it real peace.”_

_There was a slice down one side of his face. It was a shallow wound, but oozed an alarming amount of blood. She was mesmerized by the torpid movement._

“ _There are better ways than this,” she breathed, staring at the crimson staining his skin and seeing only the corpse of London stretched out before her. “There has to be...”_

_Suddenly she found her back pressed hard against the wall, his hands painfully tight around her arms and his face alarmingly close to her own. “No, you little **fool** , there is no better way. This is the only way to teach the feral dogs to heel.” There was something so wild about his eyes, his posture, his voice... for the first time, she felt a sliver of fear worm its way up her spine. He saw it as soon as she did and something fragile crumbled inside him. His hands released her arms and went back to her face, holding it tenderly and looking at her with a pleading so desperate that it shook her._

“ _What happened to you?” he whispered brokenly, searching her eyes for an answer. “You understood. You among all your kind understood the peace that came from acceptance. You accepted your fate, you... you accepted **me**...” All at once, she was struck with the most terrible realization she had ever had._

_Every word he said was true. She had taken her fairytale as if it was her due, never questioning the price at which it came. Her willful ignorance and childish stupidity had blinded her to the truth. There had been plenty of hints, of clues and allusions. She had turned a blind eye to them all. But that didn't stop her from being furious at it all just the same. She squeezed her eyes shut, took a deep breath and turned her head away._

“ _I accepted a lie.” Even as she said the words, she knew they were not true, but there was something foul and angry twisting inside her gut that was satisfied by the sound of them._

_Without even looking, she knew he was gone._

She had always thought 'the winter of our discontent' had been a very stupid turn of phrase. As it turned out, it was also an accurate one.

_She sat inside the small, dark room with all the grace and poise she thought a queen should have. A hand rested on the small curve of her swollen belly and she surveyed the others surrounding her with a very strange kind of detachment._

“ _I will help you,” she said quietly, shocked at the calm in her own voice. “But I have conditions.”_

_The dark man spoke up first. He hadn't changed even a little bit. “Name them.” The rest of them had, though. Surrounded by people she had once called friends, she was struck hard by how old and worn and hard they all looked._

_She searched those faces for one in particular. Finding it further back than she anticipated, she inhaled deeply and locked her eyes to those of her child's uncle._

“ _When my son is born, you and your wife will take him to Asgard. You will raise him as your own son away from this. He will **never** know this story. I refuse to let history repeat itself.” The lion-like man looked surprised, but after a moment, he nodded. She felt immense relief. At least one of them understood. That was enough. It would have to be._

“ _I take it that's not all you had in mind, “Your Majesty”.” The scorn and mockery with which that dark-hearted, one-eyed man addressed her stung, but she was too cold to feel it as keenly as he would have liked._

“ _No,” she answered him, lowering her gaze so that he could look her straight in the eye and see all of the solid resolve frozen inside her once-bright soul. “I will be the one to do it. If one of your people so much as lays a finger on him and I will rip them limb from limb.” There was a silence in the bunker's interrogation room that almost made her smile. Stunned. They were all stunned. She'd never been able to stun people like this before._

_The one-eyed man searched for something in her gaze. She guessed it was hate he wanted to see. She had none of that, but he seemed satisfied in the end. “I understand. That is acceptable.”_

There had been moments of fragile, fragmented brightness among that winter's gloom, but not much. Not nearly enough.

_She sat in a hospital bed, one hand resting on the melon-sized lump protruding from her stomach and the other clinging tightly to the bed railing as the world around them shook. She felt a stab of white-hot fear that was not her own and she began humming, rubbing soothing circles over her stomach until that panic subsided. Nothing of hers was ever that warm anymore._

“ _He grows stronger with every day.” She looked up, startled. The doorway was taken up with the spirit of a lion harnessed into the body of a man. She smiled, in spite of herself._

“ _He will make you a fine son.” He looked uncomfortable for a moment, abandoning the doorway to sit gingerly in the chair beside her bed. “How is your wife?” she asked instead, hoping for more neutral ground._

“ _She is well, thank you.” He lifted his gaze to hers and looked so much like a lost puppy that it was physically painful. “She misses you. She just-”_

“ _Stop,” she snapped, cutting him off with more force than she intended. “Please. I … I can't. Not now.” She braced herself against the bed as another tremor rocked their underground hidey-hole, but in the ensuing silence there was a kind of peace. Relaxing, she released the bed rails and leaned back, both hands resting over her stomach in a gesture of protective affection._

“ _You loved him, did you not?”_

_The question was so quiet, so hesitant, so patently everything she had come **not** to associate with the man sitting at her bedside that it took her by surprise._

“ _I loved a man who was giving and intense, careful and passionate, protective of the things he held dear. I loved someone who believed that I was something more than insignificant. I loved a man who was haunted by his past and troubled by his conscience.” She laughed, but it was a bitter one, and cold. Everything about herself felt so cold now. “In short, I loved someone who never existed.”_

“ _He **did** exist, once.” She could feel something reminiscent of a heartbeat in her chest when he said that. “What you have described... it is my brother as I remember him. As I will always remember him. If you saw these things so recently, then you must have touched him deeply – in a way that... that I was unable to do.” Tears, so hot that they burned behind her eyes, welled up and cascaded down her cheeks, but her face still felt frozen as she stared at her lover's brother and watched an unexpected moment of wisdom steal over his familiar features. “And you may use the past tense as much as you like. It is plain that you love him still.”_

_As if he had pulled the keystone from the core of the dam, she felt her control crumbling away under her fingers. Though she railed against the torrent of emotion pounding behind the broken wall, she was powerless to stop it._

“ _And so what if I do?” she spat. “What has love ever done for either him or me?” He was silent, but it didn't make her feel better. “If love was all it took, neither of us would be sitting here cowering while **bombs are dropped over our heads** and...” She choked on a sob. “And my life would still make sense. Love won't cure this. It won't fix this. It just makes it hurt **more** so I ask you. What the fuck good does it do that I loved him? That I love him still? That even now I hate myself because I want nothing more than to crawl back into bed, wake up to his arms and pretend that it's nothing more than a bad dream? Can you answer that? You in all you **godly** power. Can. You. Answer. That?”_

_He had no answers, but she forgot to be angry about that when the first flash of pain ripped though her abdomen like wildfire. She screamed and by the time the first wave had receded enough that she could see again, he was gone and there was a pool of hot blood burning her thighs. She had time only for a breathe before the next spasm of agony struck her fragile human body and an endless repetition of nononononono was her only link to sanity._

_The next time she became aware, there were at least ten masked faces surrounding her, shouting garbled instructions to each other and wheeling her through a maze of hallways she had never bothered to learn. Her stream of denials had turned into begging and pleading intermingled with the screaming when the pain became too intense. Most of what tumbled from her lips was nonsense, but she knew with dreadful certainty that there was one name she pleaded for most of all._

_As time passed and her tiny body tried to expel the bright light it had carefully nurtured, she became aware that she was becoming further and further distant from her body until it was as if she was watching a first-person recording of the chaos and trauma instead of being the one to experience it all._

_This must be what insanity feels like, she thought idly, or maybe death..._

_She couldn't feel anything anymore, but she felt cool, strong arms wrap around her shoulders and pull her back against a solid, familiar chest. Familiar lips pressed into her hair and murmured her name and endless endearments. Unfamiliar tears, as hot and burning as her own, fell onto her forehead and slid down her face. If this was insanity, she thought, it was no wonder people became lost in it never to return. It was far more merciful than she deserved._

That was the last memory she had, before the here and the now.

Standing on the roof to the last part of her former home to remain standing, she looked out on all the destruction she and her allies had wrought. This was so much worse than seeing London. This place she had intimately known when it had been full of light and life and color. She could see those ghosts overlaying the blood and wreckage and bodies that were as much her kills as if she'd pulled the trigger, if she'd pushed the buttons.

There was fire in the distance and she knew, somewhere deep down inside her soul – in the last place the ice had not touched – that it was almost over. That soon her work would be finished. The debt she owed by being part of this would be repaid in blood by her part in ending it. She no longer had enough faith in the universe to believe she could ever be at peace after this, but she did want to rest. Soon, she told her tired body, soon.

A cold wind blew from behind her and her senses were flooded by a presence she had dreaded and craved for the last six months.

“You,” he whispered. Her heart cracked beneath its ice. Slowly, she turned, her body – so drained from the birth that should have destroyed it and hopped up on so many stimulants that it was tearing itself apart at the seams – seeming to act without her express instruction, as it always did around him.

“I came with news,” she answered him, unable to keep the cold sadness from her voice. “You have a son.”

He was limping, covered in blood and filth, pressing his hand to a wound in his side, but his eyes as they met hers were the same as they always had been; they were burning, terrified and furious and in pain and yet so very glad to see her. “What is he called?” he wheezed, maintaining the distance between them more for the sake of staying upright than anything, she suspected.

“Veles,” she answered him quietly, knowing only he would understand. He did. It made him laugh, though that brought him to one knee with pain.

Looking at him brought so low, on the brink of watching everything he'd ever had crumbling to dust, she knew her place in this world.

She was not a hero, though she had always known it.

She was not an observer, though it had been her beginnings.

She was not a queen, though she had done all she could to do right by her people.

She was simply a woman. She loved. She lived. She made her choices. She had not chosen an easy path, but she would not have to live with those choices for long. The man – the beautiful, broken man – she loved would pay for his choices. She would pay for hers, but at least they were going to do it together.

She gritted her teeth and crossed the space that separated them, letting him lean his forehead against her sore stomach. “They'll kill me soon,” he said as she propped his back against a large piece of rubble and lowered herself to sit beside him.

“No,” she replied. “I won't let them touch you.” He turned and looked at her then, something between wonder and regret shaping his expression.

“You brought them here, didn't you? Unleashed the avenging angels.” She did not deny it. She was too tired and they'd come too far for that, now. “Why? Do you hate me so much?” She smiled and reached over to squeeze his hand.

“I don't hate you at all. I made a choice.”

“You could have made a different one.”

“So could you.” She could tell that struck a chord, though both of them were distracted momentarily by sounds of shattering glass from the direction of his great observatory.

“No,” he gasped out bitterly, finally breaking the silence. “I am what I was made by a world that failed to accept what it could not understand... or control.” She didn't argue, because there was an element of truth to what he said. Slowly, he turned his head to face her again, dawning realization in his eyes. “And you are what I made you. My own annihilation.” He slumped back against the rubble and sighed. “There's some poetic justice to that, you know. Somewhere.”

Her body was giving out. Already she could feel it starting to slow and shut down. And she'd be damned if she was going to spend her last few moments alive arguing. Using all the strength she could muster, she scooted her body so that she was pushed right up against his side, lifting his arm to weasel in underneath it the way she had done countless times before.

“My love, we are about to die. My protection only lasts so long as I'm alive and I...” A spasm of pain from her stitches silenced her and she whimpered a little against his chest. “Just once, for one moment out of our lives, can we not lie to ourselves?”

He said nothing, but his arm tightened around her shoulders and she felt him tuck her head beneath his chin.

“Are you afraid of me?” he asked her softly. She wanted to laugh – would have, if she'd had the strength. Trust him to take advantage of a moment of truth to soothe his deepest fears.

“Never,” she answered truthfully. She had been horrified by his actions, sickened by what he believed about humanity and even his own existence, even once afraid of what his actions might be, that night she had learned a horrible truth and fled from it. But of _him_ , the entity that she loved? She was not afraid. She recognized that there was probably something terribly wrong with her sanity, but she wasn't.

And right now, as she could feel greyness creeping in on the edges of her vision, she really didn't give two shits about her sanity. She wouldn't need it where she was going. Held close against her broken lover, she didn't even mind so much.

“I've missed you,” she breathed.

“I'm sorry it took me so long to find you,” he whispered back. She felt him shift, his chin lifting to look up at something in the air above them. She tried to look too, but no longer had the strength to lift her head. “I have just one trick left,” he said a little bit louder, the rumble of his voice in his chest soothing against her ear. “How would you like to become a star, hmm?”

She couldn't form the words to answer him, but being a star didn't sound so bad. At least she could hold onto this new warmth a little while longer. He seemed to understand.

“Hold tight to me.” There was something in his voice that sounded like resignation. She felt his chin lower enough to bump her head and then lift again, as if he was nodding deeply. Who he could be nodding to, however, she had no idea. He pulled her more fully onto his chest, wrapping both arms around her and holding tight. There was a strange sort of beeping from somewhere above and away from them. She didn't recognize it, but it only tickled at the very edges of her awareness. The rest of it was taken up by a shaking whisper at her ear, saying words he could never speak by using words she had learned long ago to interpret.

“You are _mine_.”

The beeping was steadily getting louder, more insistent.

“My fearless treasure.”

That was the last thing Loki ever told his Darcy before they burst into heat and light and energy.

“ _The constellation Tilkvama is the only incidence on record of spontaneous and simultaneous generation of multiple stars. It is also the only cluster of stars known to be able to be seen both from Earth and Asgard. It is one of the continuing mysteries of our ever-expanding universe.”_

_Veles looked up from his textbook, glancing at his chocolate curls and silver-green eyes in the mirror before grinning very wide._

_If only they knew the **whole** story, astronomy might be less boring._


End file.
